Comment by woah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by woah | Hacker News Reader

I've used Paperspace's Gradient product (hosted Jupyter notebooks), and while it is cheaper than most other options, I can't recommend it. The service has a very janky feel. When I first started, there was an issue where my instance was was stuck "shutting down" for half an hour or more and I couldn't access my code. Then there was a weird issue where some kind of geographical split between different types of instances resulted in my code getting lost (I think it happened twice). It has the feel of a product held together by duct tape and chewing gum with a thin veneer of slick graphic design. I recently tried using their CORE product (GPU heavy VMs), but for some reason instances with GPU's are not enabled until you write them a message (I did, and they haven't responded in a week).

My advice would be to use the cheap, high performance machines (VC subsidized?) if it makes sense, but never ever store data with them without backing up to a different service (git or Dropbox maybe?)

CEO of Paperspace here. I'm really sorry about this. That is not the experience that we are striving for and FWIW, since leaving beta, Gradient is much more mature at this point (many millions of hours of runtime and lots of developer work). We have been aggressively stabilizing (and building out new features) over the past few years and continue to improve the product every release. My sincerest apologies for your negative experience early on I hope you will give it another try.

I'm a customer, and one thing that I think would be helpful would be to ensure that notebooks launch inside of the storage folder. In fact, I'm not sure there should be any folders other than the storage folder and another folder labelled to tell the user this data isn't going to persist, or is volatile.

I really like a lot of the features you have in place, but had weird things like files disappearing, git repos being erased except for folder name, etc.

That being said, I think there's a lot of value here, and once I defaulted to using only storage, had less issues with Gradient. I think the concept behind your company, seems to be democratizing the devops needed for getting on-demand compute, and I dig it.

Hit me up privately if you want to talk more. There's some potential ideas I'd like to discuss with you involving my employer and potentially augmenting our product with yours (and bringing customers with us). Hope that last statement tells you that despite the warts I've experienced, I really admire what you have accomplished. I'm a big, big fan of intuitive UX that simplifies high-value tasks, and I think you've achieved a lot there.

It's cool that you're responding in this thread, and thanks, but I just have to mention that these experiences are from about a month ago. Not sure if that's what you mean by "early on".

Do you have some sort of "fair use" policy for GPU instances? Is it OK with you to peg them at 100% usage all the time?

Hey, I'm old and operate in a space where most things run at single Mhz speed (but have to work underwater, in a vacuum, and other interesting places).

What does your service do? Is it like VNCing into my dev box in the shop, except (I hope) more responsive?

That sounds really interesting. Where do you work?

I’d guess he’s a spacecraft engineer who does work in a neutral buoyancy tank. In the Us that usually means NASA/Johnson. That or he’s a spacecrqft engineer at a contract firm that picks up side projects doing underwater automation work, which is not that uncommon in this small field. Oceaneering Space Systems, for example.

The second one. I've done a couple things at NASA/Ames and it has been generally fun, although there have been a couple of weird episodes (Like me not being authorized to check out stuff from my own repository due to not being a US citizen, and being told that it wasn't a unique case).

I also can't recommend them. Service is operational when working, but the times it isn't working as expected I don't have the patience to message support. Things just aren't straightforward.

This was 2 years ago when I used them to run a couple of Windows apps for work.

Same here, except I did message support and just as you'd expect they gave me the run around.

Just saying that on Paperspace, it's all about using the storage folder. Had some challenges before, but definitely getting a lot of value out of it now.

I think the product has a ton of potential, but certainly has warts to iron out. I've so far just used gradient, and haven't experimented with the core APIs feature yet, but looking forward to seeing what can be done there.

I had issues with Paperspace too, switched over to Shadow.

I pay +/- 14 USD per month for a computer with 4 cores @ 3.4 GHz, 12 GB RAM, GTX 1080, 256 GB SSD. No commitment.

I'm not sure where is the good deal with Workstream ?

That seems like an amazing deal. Can you drop a link to Shadow? That's such a vague name I don't have a lot to go on. I am interested to dig into the details of this deal. Is there some kind of Acceptable Use Policy or is it more like a pay-as-you-go VPS?

Not OP but https://shadow.tech/

Thanks. Looks like Windows only for now, but at least future Linux support is alluded to in their FAQ.

https://shadow.tech/usen/faq/operating-system/can-i-use-shad...

How does that pencil out? Is that shared?

If it's dedicated, assuming a 3 year useful life, that comes out to ~$504, which barely covers the graphics card.

I guess the 1080 is kind of old now, maybe that helps.

A couple points:

1. It advertises itself as a gaming service, not a 9-5+overtime service. Granted, some people do game for >8 hours per day, but those people probably own their own hardware. Which leads into...

2. Many people used cloud gaming services for casual play. It doesn’t make sense for someone to buy a gaming computer when all they want is the occasional PUBG match or to play a grand total of 15 hours of Far Cry.

With those two assumptions, you can oversell the machines because the average user will be offline for the majority of the time.

Ah makes sense, thanks. I'm guessing that if a number of people start using it for ML workloads, they're going to tamp down on that. Because holy crap, that's an awesome deal, $14/instance doesn't even pay for the power for a 24/7 ML workload.

But maybe the messaging will be enough to stop a significant number of people from jumping on that.

Unfortunately Shadow is unavailable in the UK until August. Apart from that, it's a way better deal than Workstream.

Lol, yeah, I had the same issue. Followed their advertising for ‘gaming in the cloud’, only to find out that the VM’s with GPU’s were disabled. Not going to do any gaming without a GPU guys.

Eventually they enabled them, but it was such a pointless experience that I was completely turned off using it.

I basically had the opposite experience.

Not sure when you tried their service, but I think I started around... probably a year ago? Maybe a bit more.

After I created my account, I had to specifically request access to GPU plans. Once I got approval (1-2 business days), I was able to connect to a machine with their web client, set up Parsec, and get a decent cloud-based gaming experience.

Round trip latency was usually less than 50ms, which was tolerable by my eyes for a lot of games. Something like an FPS was of course out of the question.

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